Amazon.com video review:
The 1932 version of A Farewell to Arms owes as much to the
shimmering house style of Paramount Pictures as it does the novel by Ernest
Hemingway. If Hemingway purists can get past the romanticizing of the book,
however, this film offers its own glossy appeal. On the Italian front in
World War I, an American ambulance driver (Gary Cooper) falls in love with
a nurse (Helen Hayes, before she became the official First Lady of the
American The-a-tah). Cooper was a Hemingway friend in real life, and later
played the hero of Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls; his boyish
simplicity is just right for director Frank Borzage's heartfelt approach.
Image Entertainment's DVD release is a stunningly gorgeous improvement on
the muddy prints of this film that had been circulating for years, a
fitting tribute to the Oscar-winning cinematography of ace cameraman
Charles Lang (this is the kind of lush black and white that can capture the
glow from a cigarette as it plays across Cooper's darkened face--a
breathtaking touch). The jaded battle scenes show the influence of the hit
film version of All Quiet on the Western Front, especially in a
gripping montage depicting Cooper's progress alone through the war zone.
Hemingway would have none of it, of course; he once disdainfully wrote that
"in the first picture version Lt. Henry deserted because he didn't get any
mail and then the whole Italian Army went along, it seems, to keep him
company." This is first and foremost a love story, however, and as such it
succeeds beautifully, right through to the remarkably intense ending.
--Robert Horton
